Monthly Archive

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself constantly wondering “why now?” Why did it take us three tries at IVF before it finally worked? After having been through so many failed cycles, I found it to be completely inexplicable why THIS ONE was the one that worked. What was so special about this time that made us successful?

It could have been the five months of DHEA that I’d been religiously popping

It could have been my body getting healthier from the longer time frame of eating meat

It could have been because I asked to have a few eggs kept separate to try to fertilize naturally and maybe one of those was the one that decided to implant and grow inside me

It could have been because I really wasn’t “into” this cycle, I just really wanted to be done with it

It could have been the near constant use of “tacks” that my acupuncturist used this time around to maintain the right blood flow

It could have been due to the fact that instead of taking my valium the morning of the transfer, I accidentally took another Dexamethasone pill

It could have been because we FINALLY, for once, had an easy transfer because I insisted on the stiffer catheter from the get go

It could have been the one “perfect” blast that we finally had

It could have been anything. And I guess at this point it really doesn’t matter WHY I got pregnant, only that I did (though you can be certain that at some point I WILL be asking my RE how the natural fertilization attempt went). This whole experience, and the experiences of others have taught me one thing, and that this is all just one big crapshoot. There’s no other way to describe it. Sadly I’ve seen women have perfect, textbook cycles with beautiful perfect blasts who don’t end up pregnant. I’ve seen women have crappy looking cycles with seemingly no hope become pregnant. And I’ve seen everything in between. You just never know what will happen.

And because you never know what will happen, I was absolutely a wreck before my appointment this morning. I did a pretty good job of keeping myself busy and distracted at work, but every once in a while I would glace up at the clock and my stomach would start to turn as I calculated how many more minutes until we needed to leave. Finally it was time to go. We were called back within a couple of minutes and given instructions on how to prepare for the u/s, which were completely unnecessary since I’ve endured countless t/v u/s’s throughout the past year and a half. Right after I was situated on the table, the tech came back and took a few notes including when my retrieval was and how many were transferred. As a side note here, she originally asked me the date of my last period, even though she was fully aware that this pregnancy was the result of IVF. I told her I had no idea when my LMP was, but I could tell her when the baby was conceived. Why anyone would ask for the LMP when conception date is clearly known makes absolutely no sense to me. I guess that’s what you get when dealing with OB’s, not RE’s. But I digress.

She asked if this was my first cycle and I told her it was my third and that none of the prior cycles resulted in pregnancy. As she was walking over to get the wand ready, she asked if we were excited and I told her that I was incredibly nervous. She said she understood and that we’d get right down to business. Once the wand was in, I could immediately see the black blob of a gestational sac, but it looked completely empty. She briefly declared that there was a sac there. I started to panic, but then she moved the wand just a tiny bit and I could see a little white blob inside of it and I immediately felt better. She moved away for a second, scanning the rest of the uterus and I saw another, smaller black blog appear on the screen and she said there was another sac. The discovery of a second sac surprised me, but I immediately discounted it since it was so much smaller than the first and my betas in no way indicated twins.

She went back to the first sac and zoomed in and I could see the little white flicker that is our baby’s heartbeat and squeezed Mark’s hand tight. I had explained to him beforehand what we were looking for at this u/s, so I was assuming that he knew that’s what it was. If not, it was certainly cleared up when the tech announced that we were looking at the heartbeat. She turned on the speaker and lined up the wand and we were able to hear the heartbeat beating at a beautiful 124 beats per minute. I was overwhelmed at this point and a few tears slid down my cheek onto Mark’s hand.

She took the CRL measurement and said that the baby was measuring six weeks, which had me concerned since I am six weeks and four days today. I know that early u/s’s are notorious for being off by as much as a week, but that didn’t really calm my fears. She moved around and took a bunch of different measurements, then took another measurement of the baby from a different angle and said that measurement was better, at six weeks and three days. I told her out that the new measurement made me feel so much better, because it did.

She continued to take some more non-baby-related measurements and she mentioned that my ovaries are looking “fluffy” from the stimulation still. She eventually did a repeat scan of my uterus in search of the second sac. After a bit of searching, she said at first she thought there was a second sac, but now she “took it back” which was fine with me because I knew that even if there was a second sac, it was entirely too small to be viable at this point. She congratulated us and said that situations like these are the best moments of her job.

We’re due to go back in another two weeks for a dating ultrasound, which seems pretty silly since we know the exact date of conception, but I look forward to seeing our baby again then. She said they don’t do “official” due dates until the dating u/s, but for now she put my due date at February 18th or 19th.

The weight of not knowing how today would turn out has finally been lifted from my shoulders. I feel like a new woman. While today had a positive outcome, I know that there are no guarantees and you never know what can happen down the line. But for today, and hopefully many days to come, I’m no longer asking “why now” and trying to find the answers to all of my questions. Today I resolve to be happy with what I have, to enjoy the sheer pleasure of the happiness.

Today marks the end of my sixth week of pregnancy. Assuming that I am, in fact, still pregnant. I absolutely hate thinking that way. Hate.it. But I can’t help it. I was really hoping that once I hit that magical six week mark I would start to feel some reassuring symptoms. I even told my husband last night that I hoped I puked today. So far – nothing. Not even the smallest twinge of nausea. No exhaustion so extreme that I can’t make it through the day without a nap. No metallic taste in my mouth, no super sensitive nose, no dark blue veins on my chest. Nothing. It is so difficult for me to believe that Monday’s u/s could have a good outcome given my complete lack of symptoms. I am such a Debbie Downer, it’s disgusting.

In other news, I did end up telling my boss that I am pregnant on Friday (after she asked…I didn’t offer it up to her out of the blue). One of the first things out of her mouth was “how much time are you planning to take off?” I was caught off guard by the shocking confidence of her question, assuming that a pregnancy would lead to a guaranteed baby in the end, especially since I know that she’s had a miscarriage before. I stammered that I hadn’t even begun to think about anything like that and that after 2 ½ years of trying to get pregnant, I can’t let myself even begin to think about anything beyond today. She said something to the effect of “Well I have to think that after trying for so long, the fact that you’re pregnant now means that this one will last.” Umm. OK. There’s absolutely no logic whatsoever in that statement. I appreciate her positive attitude about things, but it’s very clear that she’ll never understand what it’s like to go through what I’ve been through, and I don’t expect her to. I know that we will probably never be on the same page regarding pregnancy, and that’s fine with me. It doesn’t bother me, it’s just a little shocking how confident she can be, even with her previous loss.

So there we are on opposite ends of the spectrum…she’s planning out her maternity leave and I’m terrified that at any moment the other shoe could drop. I like her outlook better, I just wish I could get myself to think that way.

I have to be honest, the past two weeks since getting our first positive pregnancy test are nothing like I expected they would be. Instead of feeling the relief, excitement and sheer exhilaration that I had expected to feel, instead I feel very worried, anxious, doubtful, insecure and somewhat numb inside.

And I should have known to expect this. I have plenty of friends both on the internet and in real life who have all gone through the same thing after finding out they were pregnant. I knew that this would probably happen. But the problem is that I never really fully expected that we would actually get pregnant. I never really believed that I would even have the chance to have to deal with this.

But now here I am. I am trying my best to just think positive things, but it is amazingly more difficult than I feel it should be. Our first ultrasound is still a whole week away, and I’m absolutely terrified that something has already gone wrong and I’m just naively shooting PIO into my ass every night to sustain a pregnancy that isn’t even viable.

The lack of symptoms definitely does not help at all. In the beginning I had cramps and pulling sensations, which I found reassuring. Now I have nothing. I’m not peeing any more frequently than normal, I’m not exhausted, I’m not hungrier than normal. The only things that are different are that I’m warmer than usual (attributed to the PIO), my boobs are sore to the touch (again, attributed to the PIO) and I don’t have my period (yet again attributed to the PIO). And I know that symptoms don’t usually kick in until 6 weeks, which is right around the corner and may provide some reassurances, but right now I’m having such a hard time dealing with being in limbo. I’m struggling to believe that this pregnancy could possibly be real and end up with a real, live, genetically-ours baby.

I find myself terrified that the pregnancy could have ended last week after my second beta and I just don’t know it yet. I find myself stressing out about the spotting episode a week and a half ago, wondering if it was a sign of bad things to come. I find myself prefacing every statement I make to my husband regarding this pregnancy (which are few and far between) with “if everything goes as planned.” I find myself looking at the calendar trying to figure out how future plans will work with our potential due date, then quickly stop myself, afraid to believe that we could actually have a baby next year. I find myself stuck in an unhappy place of being afraid to enjoy the one thing that I’ve waited two and a half years for.

To clarify, I’m not miserable or depressed or anything like that and I’m making it through each day alright. I’m not about to lose my mind from anxiety or anything. I just wish that there were some reassurances, or even a sign that things weren’t going well, if something was wrong. I just hate all of the unknown. What I wouldn’t give for some answers right now. Patience. I just need lots and lots of patience.

I promised further details on Tuesday, but have since failed to provide them.

2:50 – I hear my boss’ cell phone ring. Remember how I mentioned that we both had our betas pretty much at the same time on Tuesday? Well she shuts the door to take the phone call. I assume that it’s our OB/GYN’s office calling with her beta results since they get all their lab work back around 2:30

3:08 – I send an e-mail to my husband letting him know how nervous the waiting is making me. He tries unsuccessfully to calm me down.

3:38 – I send another e-mail to my husband asking if they’ve called him with the news (In the past, I’ve had them call Mark instead of me because I was too afraid to get bad news at work). I told him that if they HAD called him and it was bad news, I didn’t want him to keep it from me, I just want to know what’s going on. He says he’s heard nothing.

3:50 – I call my OB/GYN’s office to make sure that they’ve faxed the results over to my clinic. I talk to the lady in the lab and she say she faxed them shortly before 3, so they should definitely have them. I didn’t have the balls to just ask her directly what the results were.

4:45 – Mark stops by my desk and asks if I’ve heard anything. Ummmm….no. Don’t you think if they had called I would have told you immediately? He offers to call the clinic to see what’s going on and I give him the contact info.

4:47 – I give up pretending to work and go home because I can’t take the stress and pressure anymore. I lay on the couch moping about what could have been because I’m absolutely convinced it’s bad news.

5:00 – Mark arrives home and finds me on the couch. He asks what’s wrong and I tell him I’m pouting and moping. He asks why I’m not happy and I ask him why in the world I should be happy. He responds with “Because we’re having a baby!” Holy cow. Honestly, the relief that I felt when he told me my beta was perfect was unlike any I’ve ever experience before.

He pulled out his sheet of notes with all of the details on it and shared it with me.

The part that I’ve cropped out at the bottom has a list of names on it. They were suggestions from our clinic of names that we could name our baby. The list included our RE’s last name, which I think would make an absolutely adorable little boy’s name, our nurse’s first name, and also a variation on her last name, which would also make a cute boy’s or girl’s name. The list made me laugh and also made me feel good. It made me feel like this was as big of a victory for them as it was for us, which meant a lot to me. It also made me laugh that Mark wrote down the list…and that he wrote down my name at the top of the notes too. Like he might later be confused whose beta results he was writing down.

As you can see on the notes, they wanted me to have my first ultrasound in two to two-and-a-half weeks. I’m as about impatient as they come, so of course I went for two weeks and our first ultrasound will be on June 29th at my local OB/GYN. I will be six weeks and four days then, so we should be able to see the heartbeat then (fingers crossed). We have another ultrasound scheduled two weeks after that as well, at which point we would be “released” from our RE, which is kind of a silly term since we aren’t even seeing them at all from here on out.

Anyway, there’s the recap for you. I’ve been able to just relax and enjoy myself the past couple of days, which has been really nice.

Oh, and for those who have been wondering, my boss hasn’t asked anything yet. I’m not sure if she will or not, but Mark and I decided that it would be OK to tell her if she does ask. I’m not exactly thrilled about having her be the first non-infertile to find out, but it’s also not the end of the world either. I know she’s trustworthy (as far as I know, she’s kept our yearlong “we’re starting fertility treatments” statement a secret) and like I said before, it could help my non-professional relationship with her.

So there’s my life in a nutshell. Just hanging in there and trying to enjoy every moment.

Holy crap. In what has undoubtedly been the longest and most stressful day of any history I can remember, I am pleased to announce that I am amazingly and unbelievably still pregnant.

The agonizing wait had me convinced that the numbers weren’t rising appropriately and no one wanted to share the bad news with me.

My husband just got home and shared with me that my beta today was 588, which, when I whip out my handy dandy calculator, happens to be EXACTLY four times what it was on Friday. What can I say, I’ve always been a perfectionist.

The stress of the exceptionally long wait today has left me utterly exhuasted and completely drained. I’ll update with more details later.

Thanks again for all of your kind comments and cheers, they mean so much.

Seriously. I think my heart is about to beat right out of my chest. Of course now I’m convinced it’s bad news because who wants to give bad news? They’re probably just putting it off until the last possible second. Oh the waiting is hell. Pure hell.

So yesterday while talking to the boss lady she told me that she goes to the same OB/GYN that I do. She also said that she was going to have her blood test today. I didn’t occur to me until I was recapping our conversation for my husband that there was a small chance that we could run into each other while having our blood work done. Yup. It happened. She was turning into the parking lot as I was turning out. If you’ll remember, I told her that I wasn’t having my beta until Friday, hoping to buy myself a few days with the results so that we could adjust, either way. I know that she’ll ask me what I was doing there since my test wasn’t supposed to be until Friday. I’ve decided that I’ll just tell her that I had some spotting and they wanted to check my progesterone to make sure that everything is OK. Do you think it will fly? I hate, hate, HATE lying. This stinks.

I am completely on edge today. That calmness that I felt yesterday is 100% gone today. I was thinking about it and realized that I knew what the outcome of Friday’s beta would be, to some extent. I knew that I was pregnant, I just didn’t know exactly how pregnant I was. This time around I have no idea what to expect. I know that last night’s test is darker than Friday’s, but that doesn’t mean anything. So my beta will probably be higher, but I have no idea how much higher. I am 100% in the dark here. I’m not above begging, so please, please, please let my beta be around 600 today. Please.

So my boss called me into her office again today. Her boss had spent a significant amount of time in her office with the door shut about an hour or so prior to that, so as always happens when she calls me into her office, my stomach sank just a little bit.

I should have known that she didn’t want to discuss work. The second the door closed she started the conversation by saying “You know how I was going to test on Friday? I couldn’t wait and tested this morning and I’m pregnant!”

I was genuinely happy for her though and smiled and told her congrats. I asked her what her next step was and she said that she was going in for her blood test tomorrow, so I asked her what OB/GYN she went to. Turns out she goes to the same one I do, at which point I launched into my history with Dr. Ass Clown. She asked if I was doing my fertility treatments with him, which made me laugh. I explained that I pretty much only do my blood work there now when I have to have tests done.

She asked me about some details about our treatment and I explained to her that we were, in fact, doing IVF and that this was the last chance at a biological baby for us. She asked again when I would know if the cycle was successful and I lied and told her the blood test was on Friday. She asked if I had tested at all and I lied again told her no. She asked if I had symptoms and I lied yet again. I couldn’t stop the lies from spewing from my mouth, but this is too private for me to share with my boss just yet. Our parents don’t even know yet.

Anyway, eventually the conversation ended though not before my boss reiterated how much she hopes she has a girl since she has two boys already. I told her that if she ended up with a boy, we’d be more than happy to take the little boy off her hands so she could try for a girl. Nice. Really classy, I tell ya, but I couldn’t help it…I meant it. Anyway, she asked me to keep her up to date as to what happens on Friday.

Eventually I went upstairs to tell my husband that she was pregnant. As I was walking up the stairs, it occurred to me how dramatically different the entire conversation would have been for me if I were not already pregnant. I can’t even imagine having that conversation if I hadn’t already had a good beta. I know that pesky lump would have formed in the back of my throat and tears would have sprung to my eyes, which I would have desperately tried to fight back.

I found my husband in the kitchen getting some water and told him the news. I told him how while I think that us being pregnant together would be a good opportunity for us to bond, it also absolutely scares the shit out of me. To have my very own boss be due only a week and a half behind me would cause so much heartache for me if something were to happen to this pregnancy. To have to watch her growing belly and hear her talk about her pregnancy would absolutely kill me. He reassured me and told me not to get ahead of myself, that we’re just taking things one day at a time. That’s all that we can do at this point.

In other news, I caved this evening and tested again. The line was definitely darker than the last one, but once again I was disappointed by how “not dark” it was. I’m not concerned that there is anything wrong, I was just hoping that maybe it’s be closer to the same shade as the control line. Through lots of thorough research (which translates to frequent visits to this webpage, I’ve convinced myself that my particular package of tests must be pretty weak on dye. For example, there are more than a few tests where the beta was around 150, just like mine, and the test line was nearly as dark as the control line. Mine was absolutely no where near as dark as the control line. In fact, based off of those tests, I fully expected Friday’s beta to be somewhere in the 50-75 range. I guess all that it proves is that you really can’t base anything off of the darkness of the tests and that’s a nice consolation for me. In fact, I’m only slightly nervous about tomorrow’s beta. I feel good about it and maybe that’s just because I have absolutley no control over it. What will be will be.

Last night, for the first time, I had to get up in the middle of the night to go pee. Finally, I thought, a new pregnancy symptom. I was quite happy about it since right now all I have are the occasional cramps. I know it’s still too early for most symptoms to kick in, so this was reassuring to me.

I didn’t bother to turn the light on since I know where everything is and we get some light in the bathroom from our neighbor’s lights which are on all night long. I peed, and as I was doing so, I realized that the gentle reassuring cramps that had been putting me at ease at a pregnancy symptom, had all of the sudden given way to a deep, heavy, “I’ve got my period” type cramp. I wiped, and as I always do, checked the toilet paper. It was dark in the bathroom, so I couldn’t be sure, but it almost looked like there was some color on the paper. I got up and turned the light on and saw in horror that there was dark pink/light red blood on the toilet paper. I wiped again, and still more. One more time and still a little bit more.

My heart was pounding and thoughts were racing through my mind at a mile a minute. I know that while spotting in pregnancy is not normal, it is most certainly common. However, that comes with a caveat, and that is spotting without cramping is OK. Here is am in the middle of the night with major cramps and blood on the toilet paper. I thought for sure it was all over. I gave in to my fear and put a panty liner on, but wasn’t willing to make a full concession and put on a pad. I returned to bed fearing the worst and hoping for the best and tossed and turned for the rest of the relatively short night, having terrible dreams about chemical pregnancies and miscarriages.

I woke around 5am and couldn’t fall back asleep. I was terrified. I didn’t want to get out of bed for fear of what I would find. Eventually I couldn’t stall any longer. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom, only to find my husband was already in there. He asked what I was doing up, but I didn’t answer and just turned around and went back to bed to wait for him to finish. He came into the bedroom and asked me what was wrong. I tearfully explained that I had been bleeding the night before and that the bleeding combined with the cramps didn’t look good. I told him that it could be something completely innocent or it could be a very bad thing. I know I broke his heart. I just kept repeating over and over again “I’m sorry” even though I knew it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do to prevent or cause this. I asked him if I should try to get in to the hospital or something to have another beta done, just to see what’s going on. He asked if we could do anything to help the situation if something were wrong, and I told him no, and he said he didn’t see the point in that.

Eventually we decided I had to get up and investigate the situation. I went to the bathroom and to my relief saw that there was no blood on the liner. After peeing, there was no blood on the toilet paper either, only light brown spotting. So far today, nothing more than tan colored mucous and the gentle cramps that I’m used to.

Like my husband mentioned, there is absolutely nothing that we can do at this point. The best we can do is to wait it out and hope for the best.

My nurse just called and as soon as she introduced herself I could hear some noise in the background. She asked if I heard it and I told her no and she explained that it was my doctor yelling out “Congratulations!!!” She told me that I am pregnant and that my beta was 147. She said she was so nervous when she got the fax that she almost didn’t want to look at it and that my doctor was looking over her shoulder as she pulled it off the fax to see what the number was. They are all very happy and excited for us, and I could tell it just from her voice.

I laid around in bed after the alarm went off not wanting to get up and trying wistfully to get back to sleep. It’s not because I was tired. It’s because I was terrified. I didn’t want to do another test, but felt I had to so that I wouldn’t be caught off guard when the clinic called with my beta results. Finally I couldn’t put it off any longer and I had to get up and just do it.

Much to my relief, the second line came up quickly this time. I knew this was a good sign. The line is significantly darker than the previous two tests which makes me feel better even though I know comparing two different brands of tests is silly.

So as of now, I resolve to think only positive thoughts about everything. Right now I am pregnant and the only question is how pregnant am I? I will post my beta number as soon as I have it.

First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for the sweet comments yesterday. Thank you to all of my blog friends and my ODC friends for taking the time to comment. They meant so much to me and were so much fun to read. It was pretty surreal though, reading all of them and feeling like they should be for someone else, not me. It has been such a long time that we’ve been trying for this…to finally have it actually happen just does not feel real at all. I’m not sure when it will feel real. Right now it feels so delicate, like if I move the wrong way, eat the wrong thing or get too far ahead of myself emotionally, it will all be taken away in the blink of an eye. It’s such a strange place to be, mentally.

I’m not going to lie. Yesterday was a tough day for me. As I mentioned before, I took another test yesterday, and it looked the same darkness as the first test I took, if not maybe even a little bit lighter. I know that HCG levels are supposed to double every two days, so I assumed that it would be at least a tad bit darker. The fact that it was definitely no darker and perhaps even a tiny bit lighter had me on edge. All day long I just kept telling myself that the darkness of the test likely has nothing to do with how things are progressing, that’s just how tests are. I kept telling myself that, but had a hard time believing it.

Then, right after I made the big e-mail announcement to my real life support group girls, I went to the bathroom and found that I had started spotting. As a chronic spotter, I feared the worst. I can’t remember a cycle within the past two years where I haven’t spotted during my LP, so naturally spotting to me equals no baby. The perhaps-lighter-than-yesterday’s-test along with the spotting had me really, really worried that things were not going well. But I can’t do anything at this point…what will be, will be and it is 100% out of my control. I did my best to keep myself occupied so as not to think about it at all.

I also tried to formulate a game plan for keeping sane until my beta. I made the decision that I would not take another test until the morning of my beta, which is tomorrow. If I were to test today, seeing the darkness of today’s line would do nothing to help my situation and would likely only stress me out. However, I do want to test tomorrow morning so that I have an idea of what to expect when the clinic calls. If something bad were to happen, I would want to know about it beforehand so that I could prepare myself. When I woke up this morning, I was very, very tempted to throw my game plan out the window and just take the test anyway. Fortunately a stroke of sanity hit me and I resisted. Score one point for my sanity.

Then, this morning my boss pulled me into her office and told me to close the door behind me. There’s been a lot of turmoil at the workplace lately and many of my coworkers (including my husband) will be losing their jobs due to the fact that part of our company is relocating to a different state. Yet again, I feared the worst. Amazingly, the conversation had absolutely nothing to do with work.

Boss lady: I was just wondering how things were going on the pregnancy front?

I had told her last summer that we were going to be starting fertility treatments (I didn’t provide any specifics, though I’m sure by now she’s figured it out) and that I would need time off for that. I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, thinking I was interviewing for jobs or anything. Plus she’s a family lady who had to try a while for her second kid and I knew she would understand. She was excited for us and told me that she and her husband were going to start trying for their third in the spring.

Me: Oh, I don’t know yet.

At this point the light bulb goes on and I think “Maybe she’s already pregnant and is going to do the unbelievably sensitive thing and give me the heads up about her pregnancy before announcing it to the whole group.” So I ask.

Me: How are things going for you in that department?Boss lady: Oh, I don’t know, but I think I may be pregnant. I won’t know for sure for a couple of weeks, but I really think I’m pregnant.

At this point I was really confused. If she won’t know for a couple of weeks, how in the world could she be pregnant already? After a bit of digging, I found that the reason she thought she was pregnant was because they had timed sex around ovulation using OPK’s. Like I said before, she struggled to conceive her second kid because she has irregular cycles and couldn’t pinpoint ovulation. The first month they tried OPK’s, she got pregnant. I guess she must just be assuming that if you have sex around the time you ovulate, you’ll get pregnant. Which is how it works for some women, I suppose.

Anyway, there was a bunch more fluff in the conversation and more details than I probably needed to know about my boss’ cycle, but here’s how the conversation ended.

Me: Well good luck with the test next week! That’s so exciting!Boss lady: Yeah, good luck to you too! When will you know?Me: (trying to quickly figure out how to answer this) Umm…it will probably be 8-10 days before I know.

I don’t know where the 8-10 days came from…it was the first thing to come to my mind, I guess. I was really only trying to buy myself some time. Ideally I would have liked to have told her that it would be 2-3 weeks, but that just doesn’t make any sense since she knows when I’ve been away from work for appointments. So then she got all excited because it would be around the same timeframe she would be finding out. It was really a very strange conversation for me to have with my boss. I didn’t want to have to lie to her, but at the same time I do feel the need to keep this very personal thing to myself for as long as I can.

Anyway, while it was an unexpected conversation, it got me thinking. It would be pretty cool to be pregnant at the same time as my boss. It would certainly help our relationship, and that would definitely be a bonus. I like my boss, she’s a great person, but we’re really not that close on a personal level. My husband keeps telling me that I need to make more of an effort to talk to her socially, but I just haven’t, for whatever reason. If we were so lucky as to be pregnant together, it would be a good opportunity to make a closer connection with her.

Beta is tomorrow. My stomach turns every time I think about it. But everything will be just fine, right?

For yesterday and today, at the very least, I can count myself as pregnant.

After the longest two and a half years of my life, I finally saw two pink lines on my test yesterday morning. To be quite honest, I would have been shocked, utterly shocked, if my test had been negative. Unlike every other two week wait that I’ve been through along this road, this time I’ve actually had real symptoms. I’ve been having a lot of pain in my right ovary, exactly like ovulation pain. I’ve also had very mild cramps on and off for the past few days, along with a “pulled muscle” feeling every time I rolled over in bed this weekend. To go from never experiencing these symptoms to all of them happening at once had me convinced that I must be pregnant.

I actually tested on Monday night after my acupuncturist stated that my pulses “couldn’t decide if they wanted to be slippery or not.” In TCM, a slippery pulse is a sign of pregnancy, so that coupled with my other symptoms drove me to testing. I used a crappy Equate test (one of those plus/minus ones) and there was definitely a line. Faint, but definitely there. I couldn’t tell if there was color or not though. I chalked it up as an evap, was slightly disappointed, and hoped for better results the next morning.

Yesterday morning I got up and tested right away and was really disappointed when a second line did not show up immediately. It took a while for the line to faintly begin to appear. Eventually it was to the point where I could definitely see it and was indisputably there, but was still what I would consider faint. Even though I knew better, I decided to pull out the big guns and do a digital. I really, really wanted to tell my husband that night if I were indeed pregnant, but given my horse’s ass performance the last time I thought I had a positive test, I wanted to be able to reassure him that I really, really was actually, for real this time, pregnant. The line on my Answer test was pretty faint, so I was pretty convinced that the digital would be negative, but I just couldn’t stop myself. I dipped the test and a few minutes later it read “PREGNANT.”

Even though I know a line is a line and two lines means you’re pregnant, I was still shocked to see those words. After everything that we’ve been through it just didn’t even seem possible that it could actually happen. Even with IVF, the holy grail of reproductive technology, I still felt that we’d end up on the wrong side of the stats. And I know that it is so early and there are no guarantees. For now I’m trying my best to enjoy being pregnant and not spaz out about everything, though I’ve already stupidly tested again and began to freak out about the fact that it is no darker than yesterday’s test. The coming and going of the symptoms also has me on edge and I begin to worry if I haven’t had any pain or cramps for more than a few hours. Rationally I know that tests can vary and don’t necessarily have any bearing on what’s actually going on, and I know that symptoms are bound to come and go, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that in your heart. I am trying to remind myself that what will be will be and I have absolutely no control over anything that happens from here on out.

And the waiting continues. Beta is on Friday, so if you can, please think strong beta numbers for me.

31 – Number of calendar months we’ve been trying to get pregnant
91 – Approximate number of eggs I’ve produced in those 31 months
22 – Approximate number of eggs that MIGHT have been decent enough to be fertilized and keep growing
0 – Number of eggs that fertilized and implanted in my uterus, to date
38 – Vials of Repronex injected into my belly
7,900 – IU’s of Follistim injected into my belly
6 – Number of X’s drawn in permanent marker on my ass
Way too many to count – Needles thrust into my body over the last year
3.5 – Number of IVF cycles we’ve been through
61.8 – Percentage of transfers resulting in live births at my clinic in 2007
94 – Percent chance I should have had to get pregnant after three complete IVF cycles

So which part do I fall into? The 94% of women my age who statistically SHOULD have a live birth after three IVF cycles or the 6% who won’t?

OK, so maybe not three of a kind, but three in total. I was shocked when we walked into the transfer room this morning and the doctor told us that we had three to transfer this morning. Shocked. I was in no way prepared for that. He handed us a picture of the one blast and two morulas that we would be transferring. I took a quick look and made a comment about how we couldn’t get away from the morulas. He said something that I didn’t really pay attention to, but then mentioned how the blast was a perfect 4AA and looked absolutely great. Having three to transfer with one of them deemed “perfect” definitely lifted my spirits.

Transfer went smoothly for the first time ever, I think mostly because I told them that I wanted them to use the stiffer catheter right off the bat. I laid on the table for a half hour and then off we went.